Install New Fonts

If you’re bored with the fonts that came preloaded on your PC, you can install new ones. Search the Internet for fonts and you’ll find scads of sites offering new, unique, and unusual fonts for purchase or free download. If you get a thrill out of typefaces, you could almost fill up your computer with fonts.

To see all your currently installed fonts, open the Control Panel from the Start menu, click Classic View, and double-click the Fonts icon. Windows Vista lists all your fonts by name. Double-click any font, and Windows Vista shows how that font looks on the printed page, as shown in the following figure. (Click the Print button to send a sample to your printer.)

Double-click a font’s name to see what it would look like on paper.

If you’re not happy with your current font selection, you can buy or download new ones and install them on your computer. Most fonts sold at stores come with installation programs that spare you the messy details in Windows Vista’s font installer. But if your new font didn’t come with an installation package, here’s how to install it:

Place your new font in your Documents folder.

Many downloaded fonts arrive inside a compressed folder, also called a zipped folder. (Zipped folders have a little zipper on their icon.) If your font arrived this way, right-click its icon, choose Extract All, and let the wizard extract its contents to a folder inside your Documents folder.

If you’ll be installing a lot of fonts, create a new folder called Fonts inside your Documents folder and use it as a dumping ground for newly extracted font folders.

Right-click the downloaded font and choose Install.

When you choose Install, Vista adds the font to your Control Panel’s Fonts area, where it’s available to all your programs.